Shadows in the Cotswolds (23 page)

In London, all three of the Meadows brothers were in Court Room Four, together for the first time in thirty years or more. Oliver’s heart had lurched alarmingly at the sight of Fraser, sitting tall in the heart of the public gallery. His voice had faltered in the middle of answering the first real question of the day, keeping his eyes on the prosecuting barrister and fumbling for words to describe what had happened between him and Cedric a lifetime ago. He had lifted his gaze for a moment, searching for release from this excruciating ordeal, and found himself looking into the eyes of his brother. Fraser, who had failed him repeatedly in those early years. The gangly, dreamy, self-absorbed brother who managed to ignore events around him. Fraser had been in love, successively, from the age of sixteen, a Romeo who only had to see a girl to fall for
her. Immersed in his terrible memories from that time, Oliver saw a young Fraser sitting there and struggled to make sense of his presence. Why turn up now, when it was all far too late?

‘Mr Meadows?’ the barrister prompted gently. ‘You were saying?’

‘Ah, yes …’ He had lost the thread completely. ‘I’m sorry. What
was
I saying?’

The barrister could not suppress a sigh. ‘I know this is very difficult for you, sir. It would be hard for anybody. But if you could just finish your testimony. Perhaps we could read the last few words back …?’ He cocked his head at the judge for permission. The judge nodded, and the stenographer read back ‘I was forced repeatedly to have sexual relations against my will’ in a flat voice.

‘Did I say that?’ Oliver had no recollection of uttering those words. ‘Well, yes, it’s true. He forced me. He was six years older than me, in many ways a stranger, after Fraser and I were evacuated. Fraser and I went, but Cedric didn’t, you see.’

‘Thank you, Mr Meadows. Now, just a few more questions …’ The drama continued, with Oliver choking out the horrible details, appalled that Fraser was there to hear them. Until then, Fraser had been a kind of refuge, a haven of decency and distance that had nothing to do with Cedric and his ghastly abuse. He steadfastly avoided looking at his brother again. Nor did he look at the accused, his other brother, the
man who shared half his parentage only. Fraser and he were the real brothers; he had always felt that.

But it hardly mattered any more. His voice trailed away, as he saw the futility of what he was doing. He had been manipulated yet again, by these punitive forces. Everything they had told him, all their persuasive arguments, fell to dust. He remembered Sylvia from the evening before, having successfully pushed her image away so far that day. He could not afford to give attention to what either of them had said. It was too late for that, as well. He had made a case for his own behaviour, in good faith, only to have it collapse at some point during the night.

It was too late because Melissa was dead. That terrible fact was amongst so many pushed into a corner of his mind for later. The mental box containing this and much more now exploded open, and made him sag at the knees. ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t go on with this. There isn’t any point to it now. Look at him.’ He pointed a wavering finger at Cedric. ‘It was all too long ago. What’s done is done.’ He sat down, almost missing the chair that had been provided in consideration of his age. He had resolved not to use it, some twenty minutes ago.

Mutterings in the court grew louder, and the judge cleared his throat warningly. The prosecuting barrister wiped his brow. All was not yet lost. Order was being maintained. Oliver watched him with a dispassionate sympathy. This must be a very rare experience for the
wretched man. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I truly am. But this is enough. Cedric has been humiliated and exposed. I thought it was for the best, but I was wrong. He has been a model citizen for sixty years now. He has very little time left.
And Melissa is dead!’
He added this last as a howl, emotion breaking through like a river bursting its bank. ‘Somebody killed Melissa, my little sister. That’s what all you people should be thinking about – not punishing a poor old man for crimes that happened in another world, and another time.’ He was gasping for breath, his heart pounding, his eyes wet.

‘Get him down from there,’ hissed the judge. ‘The man’s on the point of collapse.’

Strong hands helped him down, but then nobody seemed to know quite what to do with him. Magically, he found himself being supported on either side by his two brothers, although there were confused cries of protest at Cedric’s desertion of his place as the person undergoing trial. There had been a token effort to keep him under guard, with a police officer stationed close at hand, but when he moved, nobody felt it necessary to use force to restrain him. He was an old man, who had been slumped in a state of almost comatose indifference since the trial opened. Nobody worried that he would suddenly wreak havoc or run amok.

‘Court adjourned,’ shouted the judge. ‘Clear the court!’

Nobody was in any hurry to leave. The drama being
played out in front of them fascinated the reporters and idle observers alike. Those who had come along in the hope of hearing salacious sexual details were only mildly disappointed by this turn of events. Many of them had begun to squirm inwardly at the way the accused simply took it on the chin. It was hard work to maintain the outrage and hatred against him. And there was clearly some sort of subplot going on. Who was Melissa? Had she really been murdered? The sibilance of her name was to be heard all around the room.

Already people were asking each other if that was the end of the trial. There had been other accusers, all of them elderly and quavering, none of them especially inviting of more than a fleeting sympathy. Even before Oliver’s collapse, there had been a feeling that the trial was ill-advised, that some things were simply best covered over and forgotten. The events had taken place in the nineteen forties, for the Lord’s sake. After the initial burst of enthusiasm for justice, however long after the event, doubts had begun to set in. The damage was severe, admittedly, but it was also irreparable. There had been whispered references to ‘political correctness’ and such a thing as going too far. Even the newspapers had begun to carry more thoughtful passages about the good sense behind the statute of limitations, where it was deemed that too much time had passed for a meaningful prosecution to be brought.

Eventually the court officials took control and people filed out, looking back at the three old men as if hoping to memorise the image. A few of them were doing just that, Oliver supposed dimly, for those pastel sketches they showed on the news. No cameras allowed in court, even these days. He leant against Fraser and heaved a deep sigh.

They were taken to a room, where Oliver’s solicitor waited. Cedric sat on a chair against the wall, and Fraser stood beside him. Of the three, he was by far the most stalwart, showing no signs of the disintegration that was evident in the other two. ‘Why are you here?’ Oliver asked him. ‘It was seeing you that finished me. I’d have been all right, if it hadn’t been for that.’

The solicitor eyed Fraser reproachfully, and tapped a pen irritably on the top of the table in front of him. ‘This is a real mess,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do now?’

‘If it depends on me, then I want to drop the charges,’ said Oliver. ‘I think we’ve been through enough.’

‘It’s not that simple. There are others involved.’

‘I believe they will agree with me. They’ve had their say, and they know as well as I do that there’s no real prospect of retribution at this late stage.’

‘Sylvia saw you – last night. Didn’t she?’ Cedric spoke directly to his younger brother for the first time in a decade. ‘What did she tell you?’

‘That you’re ill. You haven’t got long to live. One or two other things.’

‘I hoped she wouldn’t. It seemed to me like cheating.’

Nobody responded to that for a minute or so. Then Oliver replied, ‘It didn’t work. It wasn’t because of her I stopped. At least …’ He looked at Fraser, ‘I don’t think it was.’

Fraser went to him and put an arm round his shoulders. ‘It was Melissa,’ he said softly. ‘You remembered her when you saw me. She told people she was my daughter. That house-sitter – Maureen’s daughter. That’s what Melissa told her. She said she was mine. I didn’t know about her at all. She’s not mine, though, is she?’

‘She’s our sister. You were in Australia,’ said Oliver simply. ‘You didn’t know and Cedric didn’t care. And now she’s dead. I suppose it was Henry who killed her.’ The words brought a thick lump to his chest, which swelled into his throat and sent a sob escaping into the room. ‘She could have saved the business for you and your son,’ he told Cedric.

The oldest of the three brothers raised his head, and stared furiously at Oliver, out of the same dark eyes that had made him quail and beg for mercy, sixty years before. ‘Henry did no such thing. Don’t be such a fool,’ he said forcefully. ‘He’ll carry on the business just as always. He’s not such a weakling as to let this business affect him.’

‘That’s not what Sylvia thinks,’ Oliver disagreed.

‘It’s the truth, just the same, whatever Sylvia might say. He’s marrying that girl of his, and there’ll be
more Meadows to come. Nothing can change that. Some by-blow of a sister was never going to make any difference. Why in the world do you think Henry would go to the trouble of killing her? The idea is ludicrous.’

A court official came to the door. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now. There’ll be a consultation as to what happens next.’ He looked at the solicitor. ‘You’ll be informed.’

Outside the room was a large crowd of reporters, many with cameras. In the twenty minutes or so since Oliver’s outburst, word had gone round that there was a bigger story emerging and connections had been made with the murdered girl in the Cotswolds. The moment the brothers appeared, they were mobbed. Oliver shrank back; Fraser likewise. But Cedric stood firm. He permitted the TV cameras to linger on his craggy face, with impressive dignity. ‘I have a statement to make,’ he said in a voice just low enough to quieten the clamour. The mob hushed each other and gripped their pencils tighter.

‘I wish to express my regret at the death of my young half-sister, Melissa. I was not aware of it until now. It has been suggested to me that my son, Henry, could somehow be responsible for this crime. I wish to state here, publicly, that this is nonsense. Whoever might have killed her, it had nothing to do with my family. The business is not changing hands, as some people might have thought. As for my aborted trial, I dare
say I am forbidden from commenting. Suffice it to say that I hold no hard feelings towards my brother Oliver for the humiliation he has brought down on me. What remains to say will be said privately between the two of us. Thank you. I have nothing further to add.’

A barrage of questions was steadfastly ignored, as Cedric’s solicitor belatedly forced a way through the jostling crowd. Oliver and Fraser shambled after the main player, trying in vain to conceal their feebleness. Their brother, they silently acknowledged, had more backbone than they did.

Headlines were already being composed, Oliver assumed. He imagined such examples as: ‘Trial Erupts in Chaos as Witness Collapses’; ‘Link Between Meadows Trial and Gloucestershire Murder’; ‘Sex Offender Undertaker Denies Involvement With Murder’.
Clumsy
, he thought wryly. They could probably come up with something snappier than these. Perhaps, he hoped forlornly, there would be a far bigger story during the day about the economy or a small earthquake somewhere which would eclipse his own family’s sordid little activities. But meanwhile, the twenty-four-hour-news culture would probably see him on TV by lunchtime, with all the embarrassment he had hoped to avoid.

‘Do you think we’d be welcome if we paid Jenny Hardy a visit?’ Thea suggested. ‘Would she think we were out of order?’

‘She might,’ her mother judged. ‘But so what? I don’t suppose anything is normal for her at the moment. We might be a welcome distraction.’

‘I’m not sure exactly where she lives.’

‘I thought we said it was that building that is a sort of conversion of the old silk mill? At the top somewhere?’

‘Yes, I think that’s right. But are they flats or maisonettes or what? It’s not obvious from looking at them.’

‘We can ask somebody when we get there. Of course she might have gone away. People do that. She’s probably got a mother she’s gone back to for consolation.’

Thea was gratified by her mother’s eager cooperation. It had never occurred to her that here might be another fellow detective. She was still feeling warm from Maggs’s capitulation, secure in the knowledge that Drew’s partner had abruptly changed allegiance, and thereby given the future a far rosier glow. Whatever happened in Winchcombe over the next few hours or days was secondary to this. She felt reckless and carefree in her approach to helping Gladwin solve her murders. A shadow had lifted and the sun was beaming down on her. The same sunbeam was favouring her mother, as well, after the flood of seaside memories featuring Fraser. They were both smiling more readily than they had for a long time.

‘Let’s go and have a look.’

It was half past eleven – not a terribly good time for a visit, if Jane Austen was anything to go by. ‘After all, we
did
find his body,’ Thea said, doubtfully. ‘She might want to talk to us, to be assured he didn’t look as if he’d suffered.’

‘Is your police lady going to be in favour of this?’ her mother questioned. ‘Are you allowed to go and talk to close relatives of dead men?’

‘She hasn’t objected yet. She trusts me, I think. She uses me as a sort of unofficial liaison person, now and then. I can get under the skin more easily – just being an ordinary bystander, so to speak.’

‘I doubt if people see you like that,’ smiled her mother. ‘If Reuben knew something about your
reputation, his wife must have done as well. She could take against you. That’s if she’s there at all, of course.’

‘Priscilla is probably ministering to her already. She seems to be rather fond of her.’

‘I’m not so sure. That woman is not what she appears, to my way of thinking. She’s clever with words, and makes people think she’s all bluff and straightforward – but she kept a lot close to her chest, don’t you think? I keep remembering how she suddenly appeared in that alleyway yesterday. Wasn’t that a bit coincidental?’

‘Gosh – do you think
she
put him there? That hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘She’s strong enough.’

‘But …’ Thea tried to visualise it, with partial success. ‘Do you think that links her to Melissa as well?’

Maureen shrugged. ‘It’s all a complete mystery to me, Thea. I try to think about it, and get a few ideas, and then it all goes murky on me. I’ve never been anywhere near a murder before, and it’s been rather a shock. But in spite of myself, I do keep having these ideas.’ She frowned exaggeratedly, mocking herself.

‘That happens,’ Thea nodded. ‘It must be a sort of instinct.’

‘The search for an answer, you mean? Or seeing that justice is done?’

‘More the former, I think. Justice can get so complicated.’

‘That’s what Fraser says. He’s been trying to ignore this business with his brothers, but he can’t, of course. He knows he should be on Oliver’s side, and he hasn’t even met Cedric since he went off to Australia – but he can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old chap.’

‘Did you phone him?’ Thea remembered that this had been the plan.

‘I tried, and got Mo. Fraser went out early this morning, wearing a suit, and she’s not at all sure where he’s gone.’

‘Did Jason turn up?’

‘Not yet. She doesn’t know which one she should be more worried about.’

‘Were you going to tell me about any of this?’

‘Possibly not. I think we’ve said all we need to about Fraser, for the time being. I’d rather discuss your undertaker friend and his exotic partner.’

‘She’s not exotic,’ said Thea automatically. ‘She’s just mixed race.’

‘That’s what I said. Anyway, she seems nice. Coming all this way to tell you something to lighten your heart.’

The antiquated turn of phrase struck Thea as exactly right. ‘She did that very thing,’ she confirmed. ‘She said she had an epiphany yesterday, talking to Drew. Last time we met she was screaming at me to leave him alone.’

‘I won’t enquire,’ said her mother, with
self-conscious
restraint. ‘But if you’d like to tell me …’

‘Not just now. Let’s go and find that grieving widow. We might even manage to make her feel better.’

They set out with the spaniel, which Thea said would play with the golden retriever and make everything go more easily. ‘It’s my belief you’re going more to see the puppy than the widow,’ said Thea’s mother.

‘I admit it’s an attraction. I’d never have stopped to talk to Jenny if it hadn’t been for that. It really is a lovely creature.’

‘There have been times over the past three years,’ said her mother, ‘when I worried that you were going to spend the rest of your life with dogs, rather than people. I hope this Drew person is planning to change all that.’

Thea’s heart gave a lurch. ‘Don’t say that. That’s an awful thing to say.’

‘Is it? Why?’

‘Because … things aren’t like that between him and me. We just want a normal friendship, to get a chance to know each other. You probably wouldn’t like him, actually. He’s not terribly manly. He’s younger than me and only about five feet nine. Nothing like a romantic hero in the movies.’

‘He sounds perfectly all right to me. Your father was five feet nine.’

‘Carl was only five feet eight, now I come to think of it.’

Maureen sighed, as she always did when Thea’s husband was mentioned. Everybody had liked him,
the family embracing him unreservedly, despite the precipitate marriage when Thea was barely twenty-one. She had to admit that her loss had been wholeheartedly shared by all her relatives.

‘I wonder whether Jenny has much family,’ she said. ‘The poor thing. She must be only thirty or so.’

‘And I wonder whether she really is pregnant. That’ll be so strange – all those confusing emotions. That poor baby.’

Immersed in oceans of sympathy, they took the short way to Silk Mill Lane, through Oliver’s woods, expecting to be there in ten minutes.

But they never got as far as Jenny’s home. The lower part of Castle Street was blocked by a very large horsebox, attached to a powerful truck. It had jackknifed spectacularly, with the trailer painfully twisted on its tow bar. Alarmed equine cries were coming from inside. A man was dancing furiously around the vehicles, clearly at a loss as to what he should do.

‘What on earth happened?’ asked Thea, trying to make sense of the scene.

‘I was trying to avoid that bloody dog,’ came the tight response.

‘Oh, Thea – look,’ cried her mother, pointing at something under the wheels.

It was literally a bloody dog. The enchantingly lovely golden retriever puppy was bleeding and whimpering and dying before their very eyes. ‘We’ve got to get her
out of there,’ Thea instructed. ‘For God’s sake – why haven’t you done it already?’

‘What do you suggest?’ the man grated. ‘The wheel’s on top of her.’

Thea’s heart expanded to breaking point at the realisation that this was true. The dog’s pelvis was taking the weight of the horsebox – which contained at least two horses, from the sound of it. The truck’s nose was wedged into a wall on one side of the street. If it tried to reverse, the jackknifing would only get worse, and no progress was likely. ‘We have to do it,’ Thea repeated.

‘Get the horses out and unhitch the trailer,’ said Maureen, urgently.

‘She can’t possibly survive, can she? It would be best to call a vet and have her put down.’ Thea felt tears gathering rapidly behind her nose.

‘I’ve got a shotgun,’ the man said. ‘In the back of the truck.’

The three-way dilemma paralysed them all, until Thea knelt by the puppy’s head and gently stroked it. Above her, heavy hoofs were stamping, rocking the unstable horsebox. ‘Get out of there,’ said the man. ‘It could all tip over on you.’

‘What in hell’s name is happening?’ came a new voice. Nobody explained. The facts would quickly speak for themselves. ‘Patrick? Is that you?’

‘Cilla,’ he acknowledged. ‘We’ve got a right old mess here. Can’t decide what to do for the best.’

‘For heaven’s sake, man. Get the horses out – tie them to the gate over there, look. Then we can unhitch the trailer and get the dog free. She might not be as bad as she looks.’

‘Do you know what this thing weighs?’ grumbled the man, who Thea was beginning to understand wasn’t the brightest spark in Winchcombe.

‘Come on.’ Priscilla was already rattling at the fastenings of the ramp at the back of the horsebox. ‘Have they got bridles?’

‘Yeah. But they’re big, mind. And not happy.’

‘Who can blame them? Take a corner here, will you?’

Together, Patrick and Priscilla lowered the heavy ramp, and climbed in with the horses. Thea winced at the thought of yet more weight crushing the wretched puppy. Alarmed for herself as well, she crouched lower, half beneath the trailer. Her mother seemed to have disappeared from view.

Providentially, another man materialised from somewhere, who added further calm efficiency to that of Priscilla. He took one horse, and attached it to the gate, hurrying the lifting of the ramp with brief orders. Then the two men manipulated the twisted mechanism connecting the two vehicles, and within moments had heaved the trailer backwards and off the trapped dog.

Release made little difference, however. The flattened hips and back legs were plainly useless. Beyond pain, the eyes were filming over, and the head
flopped onto Thea’s lap, as she ducked away from the slowly rolling horsebox. ‘She’s dying,’ she said.

‘Oh, darling,’ came her mother’s voice. ‘What a terrible thing.’

It was disproportionately terrible. It seemed to Thea at that moment like the greatest tragedy there could ever be. She felt a helpless rage against the dim-witted Patrick, and his useless horses, flashing him a venomous look. Tears dripped onto the yellow head, as the final breath was heaved: a long sigh of release, followed by an involuntary stretching of the front legs as the muscles fought one last time for oxygen.

‘I couldn’t help it. The stupid thing dashed right under the wheels. I was only going about twenty. They get confused by trailers, that’s what it is. I swerved as best I could.’

The truth of this was unarguable. ‘I’m sure you couldn’t help it,’ soothed Maureen. ‘It was only a puppy. Can’t have had much sense.’

Only then did Thea remember her own dog. She had dropped the lead to minister to the retriever, and left Hepzie to her own devices. Now, as she looked around, she saw the spaniel sitting patiently unconcerned, well out of the way of all the activity. The heartlessness did something to bring Thea back into balance. The spaniel was trusting everything to come right, accepting that there was nothing she could do.
Even
so
, Thea sniffed,
she might have come to
offer me some sympathy
. A cuddle from a warm living dog might have been consoling.

‘Who’s the owner?’ asked Patrick, of nobody in particular.

‘She’s called Jenny. Her husband’s just died,’ said Priscilla. ‘Typical, the way things always come together like this. One thing after another.’

‘That’s true,’ said Maureen. ‘She must be too distraught to watch out for her dog properly. It should never have been out on its own.’

‘Who’s going to tell her?’ Thea quailed. ‘She’s going to be absolutely flattened.’

‘She’s flattened already. There’s no further down for her to go,’ said Priscilla. ‘I’ve just come from there, as it happens. I’ll go and tell her, shall I? If somebody can move the body and wrap it up in something.’

The nameless man who had turned up to help went back to his car that nobody had noticed. He had apparently been trying to drive up to the main street, and finding his way blocked, decided the best thing to do was hasten the removal of the obstacle. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I think I can just about get through.’

Watching him, Thea realised that several other cars were waiting for the blockage to clear, from both directions. The news of the accident would soon spread around town, she supposed. The handsome bay horses tied to the old gate added picturesque detail to the scene. The small dead dog would very
likely escape notice, especially if it was quickly covered up.

‘If you’ve just come from there, why didn’t
you
watch out for the dog?’ asked Maureen accusingly. ‘You didn’t let it out, did you?’

Priscilla flushed, but said nothing. A scenario flitted through Thea’s mind, whereby the woman had carelessly opened the door, hardly noticing the departure of the puppy. Or perhaps it had been following her when it was hit. Perhaps she had shouted at it and pushed it away, so it had been bewildered and vulnerable to a confusingly large motor in its quiet little street.

‘She hardly suffered,’ Maureen said quietly to Thea. ‘It was all over very quickly.’

‘I know,’ choked Thea. ‘It’s just—’

‘Come on. We can go and have a drink and pull ourselves together. They don’t need us here any more.’

It was the best and obvious course of action, and Thea got to her feet clumsily, brushing at her grubby clothes. There was blood on her trousers. ‘I’m a bit dirty,’ she said childishly.

‘That doesn’t matter. You need a few quiet moments somewhere, to get over the shock.’

Slowly, Thea noted once again how competent and effective her mother could be. No distracting hysterics or helpless hand-wringing – she had been the first to spot the practical solution to the problem, even though nobody had acted on her words until Priscilla showed
up and repeated them. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’